By now you’ve probably heard how Governor Schwarzenegger is claiming he will protect education spending, and balance California’s state budget by reducing other areas of spending.
The truth is different. First off, even in the governor’s proposed budget there are education spending cuts. Granted, they come out of that portion of the budget which pays for school district administration, but cuts are cuts wherever they are. For the District, his proposed cuts would reduce our revenue by about $600,000 per year, starting in the 2010/2011 school year. CLC stands to lose about $60,000 annually.
Since the District runs lean on the administrative side, and the Board has already begun reducing even that level of overhead, it’s unclear how much of this additional reduction can come out of overhead. Please also remember that we already have a $1,200,000 shortfall between next year’s revenues and expenses if we don’t make any more changes. Staff is actively looking at ways to raise more revenue, and everyone is committed to keeping any cuts away from the classrooms, but raising the bar $600,000 higher makes the challenge facing us harder. And it was already plenty challenging enough!
But there’s a bigger issue here. Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal includes almost $7 billion worth of additional funding from the Federal government. According to the non-partisan Legislative Budget office, that’s unlikely to be realized. The governor’s contingency plan for that situation involves cuts to social welfare programs…on top of the already significant cuts his baseline budget includes.
Given all of this, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the “final” state budget for 2010/2011 hits education significantly harder than the governor’s proposal. Yes, education is an important priority. But there are a lot of well-connected interest groups in Sacramento. Maybe no one of those groups is as well-connected as the education lobby…but they could well make up in numbers what they lack in individual clout. Certainly they’re not going to just throw in the towel and let the schools have what they need. And that’s not even considering the possibility, maybe even probability, that the governor’s budget is based on economic assumptions that may turn out to be overly optimistic.